It is estimated that 85% of businesses will adopt a cloud-first approach by 2025. To meet the demand and expectations of this surge, FiberLight offers Cloud Connect — a private connection to the cloud using our carrier-grade fiber infrastructure combined with our Ethernet and Long-Haul solutions.
Cloud Connect enables a hybrid cloud strategy, which can be particularly beneficial to medium and large enterprises that either have their own data center but have leveraged cloud services or for organizations that have moved their data to a public data center.
This blog offers details for decision-makers considering the security advantages and cost advantages of a hybrid cloud strategy.
The Security Advantages of a Private Connection
Private cloud connections provide additional advantages to multi-cloud strategies. These dedicated and secure network links connect the various components together. These environments are established outside the public internet, which offers organizations a more reliable, low-latency, and secure means of exchanging data and accessing resources across different cloud platforms.
Not only do private connections ensure consistent and reliable performance compared to the public internet, but these connections also facilitate direct connectivity between different cloud environments. This is beneficial for private networking a customer’s private data center to their cloud service providers.
Private networking cloud connections are widely available from established cloud providers. AWS Direct Connect, Azure ExpressRoute, or Google Cloud Interconnect are three such offerings that enable organizations to establish private connections directly to their cloud data centers, therefore bypassing the public internet. This low-latency, secure, and private connection is offered from any FiberLight on-net location to industry-leading providers, including Azure, Google, Oracle, IBM, and more.
By providing a direct, high-bandwidth link between an organization’s on-premises infrastructure, its data centers, or other cloud environments, these private connections are essential in reducing latency. In addition, private connections enhance security by keeping data off the public internet, which reduces the risk of interception or unauthorized access. The isolated nature of private connections helps organizations maintain a higher level of control over their data.
In a multi-cloud strategy that combines public and private cloud resources, private connections play a vital role in integrating on-premises infrastructure with cloud environments, creating a seamless hybrid cloud architecture.
By incorporating private connections into a hybrid cloud strategy, organizations can address performance, security, and compliance considerations, enabling efficient and secure communication between different cloud environments and on-premises infrastructure.
Cloud Services: Rent vs. Own
The cost-savings of using a cloud services versus designing and building your own cloud infrastructure often depend on the scale of your operations, specific requirements, and the level of control and customization that you need.
Designing and building proprietary cloud infrastructure typically involves significant upfront capital expenditures for hardware, networking equipment, and data center facilities. Managing your own infrastructure may involve over-provisioning to handle peak loads, which can lead to underutilized resources during periods of lower demand and increased costs.
While ownership can provide your organization with maximum control and customization, it can also come with increased complexity and potentially higher costs associated with designing, implementing, and maintaining a tailored solution. In addition, the unforeseen costs of operating and maintaining your own cloud infrastructure are the human capital costs of a dedicated team to manage tasks like hardware maintenance, security, and software updates.
For organizations concerned by cost overruns, cloud services provide a shared infrastructure model, which allows multiple users to leverage the same underlying resources. These infrastructure savings often dovetail with managed services and automation provided by cloud providers to handle routine maintenance, updates, and security, which can free up resources that would otherwise be spent on operational tasks.
Rather than over-provisioning, cloud services often provide scalability and elasticity, allowing users to scale resources up or down based on demand. This pay-as-you-go model provides cost predictability based on actual usage, which can be advantageous for organizations with variable workloads.
While it is inexpensive to put data into the cloud, it is expensive to pull data back from it. This process, called data egress fees, is charged by cloud providers for moving or transferring data from the cloud storage. This often occurs for users with a significant amount of their data center operations (e.g. business-critical applications) hosted inside the cloud. Every time data is pulled from those application servers, users are spending money.
With a private cloud exchange connection these costs can be offset by as much as 70%. FiberLight’s Cloud Connect is a solution designed to provide enterprises with reliable and private connectivity to cloud service providers. It offers direct connectivity from offices or customer data centers to cloud services. FiberLight’s secure fiber-optic-based delivery ensures consistent speed, reliability, and performance. Beyond these benefits is Cloud Connect’s ability to lower your organization’s overall operating expenses by mitigating cloud egress bandwidth fees.
Whether your organization is in financial services, utilities, manufacturing, or healthcare, the ability to benefit from the performance, speed, security, and cost-savings of a cloud exchange platform is within reach. To learn more about the features and benefits of Cloud Connect and how it can support your business operations visit our solutions page at https://www.fiberlight.com/fiber-services/cloud-connect.